Anyway, today, I want to write about books I read since the last one I finished. First of all, I must say that I have been on a tear! Here is the entire list at first and below it I will review briefly.
1. The Culture Map - Erin Meyer
2. No Filter: Instagram - Sarah Frier
3. Invent and Wander - Jeff Bezos
4. This is Marketing - Seth Godin
5. I am afraid, Debbie from Marketing has left for the day - Morten Munster
6. Drug use for grown-ups - Dr. Carl L Hart
7. How to avoid a climate disaster - Bill Gates
8. Power of Habits - Charles Duhigg
9. Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande
10. Talking to Goats - Jim Gray
11. Mentors - Russell Brand
12. Hard Crowd - Rachel Kushner
13. A Runner's High - Dean Karnazes
14. Educated - Dr. Tara Westover.
Educated
I must start with the last book first. Today, I finished "Educated" by Dr. Tara Westover. When the book finished, I found myself holding back tears and walking to the bathroom to hide. I connected to Tara Westover in some ways. While Westover's case is extreme - meaning she suffered violent abuse at the hands of her own Father and Brother and then got out of it to go to Cambridge and Harvard - I also suffered mild abuse growing up. She writes in detail about her experience living in a remote Idaho town under the omni-present shadow of her abusive, mentally ill and survivalist father. The father is so deeply mired in conjured conspiracy theories that he does not allow medicine, science, schools, police, telephone, tv in his house. The first thought I had as I got through the first few pages was about economic inequality - how can one part of Idaho be so far behind the rest of the world in today's day and age? She writes how her father, due to his deep distrust in humanity and utterly blind faith in the Mormon God, leads his children down a dangerous path. Reading through this part of the book, I felt like "I've been here". I did not suffer anywhere nearly as much as she did. However, I am now convinced for a few years that any trauma in childhood is too much trauma. It takes years for an adult human being to shed poor experiences when growing up. In the middle of the book, she describes her unlikely journey through college in Brigham Young University, Utah. She writes about her introduction to the real world and how she starts to deal with her own feelings about her family. Here, again, I felt a connection to how I felt when I first left home, then my birth-country to come to the United States. I cannot say I had the same experiences as her, but, I had similar feelings about myself as she had about herself. I felt guilt, sympathy, excitement, fear, loneliness and fatigue, all at the same time for many years. By the time I got to the third part of the book, I was deeply curious about what she did next. I wanted to read the rest non-stop so I could learn what she did to get out of her funk and blossom into the life that she wanted for herself. So, I did read non-stop and shed a tear at the end of the book just because it was so overwhelming, so truthful, so visceral to me. I imagine that to many readers, this book is about poverty, stupidity turned into a success story through individual perseverance and some therapeutic experiences. I can see how some will draw parallels to another similar book titled Hillbilly Elegy. In my opinion, this is different. This is about her education about herself. Something I sorely need for myself.
A Runner's High, Hard Crowd and Mentors
I had watched a news interview of Dean Karnazes very long ago. I was amazed! Now, reading his book for the first time, I am not that amazed! I mean, he is definitely a beast and deserves everything he has. My objection is to his superlative way of thinking about running and runners. It is facetious at best and dishonest at worst. Ultra running is an industry and he is part of it. Boy got bored, boy started running and boy made money. That is it. Of course, I am doing myself a disservice by judging him so harshly after reading only one book and watching a 30 second clip 10 years ago. Just not my type of a book. Full disclosure: I have high blood pressure, I am always stressed and I need to run. I am running these days, but, I am not even one quarter of the healthy person I used to be 10 years ago. I hope to get back on track!
Hard Crowd was in the Sunday NYT book review. I was looking for something different, possibly even fiction. Rachel Kushner wrote mostly fiction and this was a collection of non-fiction essays. That seemed like a good break from my usual fare. I am thrilled to report that I loved this book. First of all, the writing style was novel to me. I am accustomed to reading non-fiction, with facts, figures, evidence and experiments. This was just a story book of real things. Plus, some of these essays were shockingly good.
Russell Brand is awesome, Mentors is his book. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is one of my favorite comedies. He married Katy Perry! Then he had issues and went to rehab. Now, he is a new age podcast guru. I have heard him talk and I love his talks. He tackles many topics with aplomb. When his book came out, I wanted to read - just because it was from him. I don't remember any of it. Having a book by him reminds me of the evening when I dragged my wife to an auditorium to hear Cameron Diaz talk about her book and sign a copy. I have the book, I have no idea what is in it. :)
Talking to Goats
If you know who Jim Gray is, then you probably should read this book. I did not know who he was, but, I felt like it would be great to read an outsider's perspective on all these GOAT (Greatest Of All Times) athletes. I liked the book, I liked to read about all those stories from 80s and 90s. However, this book, like many others written in twilight of career was an explanation of Jim Gray's life. It just so happens that Jim Gray had a great life among some of the best people, events and stories of his lifetime. Good for him and good for anyone into sports.
Books about "Habits"
I read a series of books about habit forming. These I read to affect some much needed change in my personal life as well as my work. It started with a quest to distill my work around digital marketing. I wanted to learn how to effectively persuade prospects to buy my services. I am well versed with the process and the technology. However, the question I had (I still have), is "What exactly should I do day to day to become a good salesperson". At first I read This is Marketing by Seth Godin. In many was Seth Godin is the proto digital marketer. He started in 1984 before it was a thing. He has a different way to look at it compared to most street friendly folks. It is easy to dismiss him as an idealist. I think "This is Marketing" was an eye opening book for me. To me it cut through the crap and defined what marketing means today. What does social media mean to marketing? How do ads help (or not)? Why should there be content? And what should be the driving goal behind all of this? These are fundamental questions and Seth's book covers some potential answers.
From This is Marketing, I found "I am afraid Debbie from Marketing has left for the day". This is a very nice book. Morten Munster has done a great job of defining the marketing problem and providing a real, powerful process to solve the problem. In essence, he defines the problem as "a need to make change". For example, you need your customers to change their habit and instead buy your product. Then, he goes on to postulate that this is a System 1 problem. System 1 and System 2 thinking or "Fast and Slow" are behavioral science concepts from a Nobel prize winning scientist Daniel Kahneman. System 1 is fast, impulsive decision making. Most people make decisions based on such sort of thinking. To affect change the marketer (or any change agent) must analyze barriers, then design a "cue-response-reward" cycle that causes lasting change. I truly liked this book and wished I had purchased a physical copy to read and annotate instead of my audible book. I probably will do that some day soon.
Another book on the same topic is Power of Habits. This book does away with theory and measurement of any kind and focusses on the cue-response-reward cycle. I found the basic concepts similar to Morten Munsters book, but, the difference is that Munster's book is a lot more fun to read and has better examples from real, practical life. I think I may read this book again in paper form.
Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto is another one about habits. He has described how a simple change to standard procedures leads to a series of actions by humans that lead to better outcomes. Even though he is a cancer surgeon and his major success is in applying checklists to hospitals, he goes into some detail about how checklists are used in a myriad of situations. For example, flying a plane, constructing a high rise building and running war operations. Before reading the book, I felt like why would a cancer surgeon write a whole book about something as mundane as a checklist? He goes into that. Checklists are not just a guard rail, in fact, in critical, high stress, life-or-death situations, checklists lead to better chance of survival and success. Among many other real examples, he goes into the famous Hudson bay water landing and talks about pilot training in its context. For laypersons, it is easy to miss the power of checklists. This book brings it home!
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Bill Gates is a brilliant man and is well read. He has decided to apply his brain and his fortune to the worlds toughest human problems. One such problem is climate change. In this book, he splits the problem down arithmetic lines. What are the 7 or so biggest contributors to climate change and what are the capitalist industrial life forces of those contributors. For example, cement, concrete and steel used in construction contribute a certain percentage to climate change. So, what are the factors here? How can we replace cement? What materials exist? Another example is much more obvious - fossil fuels. How do we replace that? He has gone into a business like analyses of these topics and described some potential ways to tackle the problem. He is so business like in this book that he side steps some issues such as animal farming, social habits and public opinion. On the contrary, I feel like he somewhat trivializes the activism that calls for massive changes in the human diet. He may be right from a dollar arithmetic point of view, but I think he is being unfair to simply dismiss the idea that changing the human diet from meat to plant based or lab grown meat 100% could be great for the climate.
Drug Use for Grown Ups
This was a phenomenal book. First of all, I had no idea (until I read this book) that the US Government has an entire agency dedicated to drug abuse named NIDA (National Institute of Drug Abuse). How we had a national crisis on opioid addiction despite having this agency is beyond me. When I picked up this book, I thought this was going to be a fringe book filled with opinions and anecdotes. I thought so because there is no way to get evidence based literature on an illegal activity. I was pleased to find out that NIDA existed and this author was a senior scientist there. The book itself is great! He has written about all drug types from Marijuana, Meth, MDMA (Molly/Ecstasy), Opioids (Oxy, Heroine), Acid/PCP and many others that I have now forgotten. Not only has he conducted scientific research on subjects in his lab, but also on his own body. He asks all drug users to not only come out of the "closet" but also proudly claim actively that they do drugs. He is himself an active drug user and is telling everyone about it. The book assumes that everyone knows how many problems we have today due to unjust drug laws and Nancy Regan policies. It just goes into a great, in-depth explanation of each drug type and how or why none of these drugs are truly unsafe. One caveat is that Drug Use is only for "Grown Ups". That means, the consumer should be in good physical and emotional health, should be using drugs for recreational purposes only. Kids are not included! I should mention that this book is deep and broad, please read it. You will be surprised.
Invent and Wander
Have you read all of Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters since 1997? Me neither! So, this book contains all those letters and a few of his important speeches. What stood out to me is that Jeff Bezos did not just build a website, he has invented a new way of doing business. It is surprising to see how much business innovation he produced and how he defined his metrics over time. Other than being a single unconstrained dump of all his letters, this books is not much else. I don't mean it is insignificant - far from it - instead I am saying it is a book worth reading for any student of 21st century digital businesses.
No Filter: Instagram
This was a great book. Mainly, it is very well written as a narrative non fiction. It reminded me of a book I read long ago about Anheuser Busch titled Dethroning the King. It was unputdownable. It starts from Kevin Systrom's dorm days and ends with how Instagram influencers now rule the digital marketing world. The authoress takes the reader deep into the minds of Instagram founders, employees, their community leaders, moderators, early artists and then leads the reader deep into how Facebook and Zuckerberg think of Instagram. I found the book fascinating.
Culture Map
Culture Map is a deep dive into the background of a book I read last year. That one was about netflix - co-authored by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. This book is by Erin Meyer and it describes in detail how cultures across the globe differ and what a global manager must do to make a multi-national organization effective. I have seen first hand how multi-national organizations work. I always felt that there is just no way to plan for cultural differences other than simply wing it or stumble through it. This book provides a great framework to thinking about this problem. This book applies mainly to work culture and productivity. In some chapters, I found the authoress digressing into longs anecdotes or stories of personal experience, but, it all makes the point that she has written about. I cannot imagine how thick and slow the book would have been without her anecdotes and experiences.
Enjoy reading!
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